Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In June 2024 the Mitchell Institute, based in Victoria, did a survey of child care around Australia. I'm not happy to report that my electorate of Grey was declared the biggest childcare desert in Australia. That's not a title that I gladly received. It identified that, for every available space of child care in Grey, there were three children under the age of five. It's a three-to-one ratio. We are desperately short. It is holding my communities back in so many ways, not just for locals but for businesses that want to employ skilled workers.

We have a skilled worker shortage. They want to employ workers from Australia, even from across the world. You do the job interview: 'Oh, great. Yes, we would be very pleased to move to your town, but my partner is a nurse'—or they might be a teacher, a welder, or a shearer. Who knows—'so where do we drop the kids off?' 'Sorry, there's no child care in this town.' 'What are we meant to do? What do the locals do?' They utilise the grandparents. They utilize their mums, dads and uncles, who are, in many cases, getting run into the ground with this child-minding service. I know grandparents who travel hundreds of kilometres a week to babysit their grandchildren. It's not as if they begrudge their time with their grandchildren, but, as you move on in years, it shouldn't be your job to be the first-line carer because your family needs to get back to work for all kinds of reasons. We talk about housing crises and things in this place. You see why people want a two-income family. So many people want to keep their skills up, whatever they are. For the people who come in from outside, it is an absolute barrier.

My own home town has just lost its doctor for exactly this reason—no child care. It really is a multilayered effect. The government is here speaking about improving child care for a section of the community but not for all of the community. Last year I had our shadow minister for child care, Angie Bell, in the electorate. We toured widely through Eyre Peninsula, through the mid north and Yorke Peninsula and ran into a common complaint, that we just don't have enough, or any, local child care. My advice to these groups, where they aren't organised, is to get organised, to get the numbers together and make the case so that, when the opportunity comes up, hopefully in not too long a period, we can actually put the case forward to try to get you over the line.

We have a problem here. The national childcare system is built around subsidies. You provide the service, the subsidy is attached to the client and the money is made available to the childcare centre for the number of clients they have. I think it probably works okay where you have a big enough base. But the evidence is on the board that, if you've got a population of, let's say, 4,000, there is simply not an economic model for a private provider. You will not get a private provider to come in and build the infrastructure and then operate it, because they know they won't break even, even with the significant subsidies that sit within the system at the moment. There's a case to be made in some of those centres that are around the 4,000 mark that, if some capital were provided, that may open the space for a private provider to come in. But, of course, the further you go down the population curve the less and less that becomes viable, which leaves only local councils. I don't blame them for not wanting to take up childcare centres. Roads, rates and rubbish, and then you tack on all the other things that local councils are meant to do at the moment, including, in some cases, aged care—it really isn't a core role for them.

In South Australia we do have a system which I think is pretty successful. It's called Rural Care. It's where the education department has made child care available—on site, normally—for a small number within the community. Those centres have a maximum staff of three. Consequently, if you've got infants, that limits you to 12. In many cases it operates quite well, but in many cases they're too small, so we need those caps lifted.

The education department are anathema to the South Australian government, I must say, and the government are not interested in opening any more centres. There is a pathway forward here, of course. The Commonwealth, as the provider of child care, should be stepping into that space and working with the state government, particularly in South Australia, where this system exists, and saying, 'What do you need to make this work?'

It makes sense to me that in any small country town the best placed organisation to run child care would be one that is already in the industry of child care, and that's education. You can have a common site. You can have staff that may well be interchangeable when one calls in sick. You have a gardener and administration. No-one would be able to run it cheaper than the South Australian education department. That's the pathway forward as far as I'm concerned.

We had this report by the Mitchell Institute. I have been advised by people to get numbers together. I was very pleased that a number of RDA, Regional Development Australia, committees—I have 3½ in my footprint—have worked very hard to get up some local figures, and that's really helpful. Then there are 23 councils—I have 26 on my patch, if someone's short of one or two!—that have come together in common purpose to form a group to lobby for attention to this problem, and I thank them. I think the more squeaking wheels we've got, the more chance we have of getting some attention.

They are all pretty frustrated, and I'm pretty frustrated, because this Labor government is ladling more and more money into the sector where it already operates, and we're getting absolutely no support at all in the country regions where we cannot access child care. I just heard the previous member speaking. He said: 'We guarantee three days a week, 72 hours a fortnight, of subsidised child care.' Well, when I buy a car I get a guarantee for five or seven years, and if the gearbox falls out of it—or the transmission, as it may be—and it's no good, I know where to go and collect on that guarantee: I go back to the bloke who sold it to me, and I go back to the company that manufactured it. I've got a place to go back to. That happens with my hot water jug too.

A guarantee is a guarantee. Would the government please explain to us how we in the country are meant to collect on this guarantee of three days a week when there is no place to put our children into care. Are we expected to transport them 500 kilometres to Adelaide and put them into child care for the day? It is not a guarantee unless there's a guarantee in it, and there's no guarantee in this. It is a complete snubbing of people that live in the country and their needs. They're offering 100 hours a fortnight of subsidised care for Indigenous children. I'm not against that, but it's exactly the same thing: in many of these communities, they won't be able to access it either.

There is no longer any prioritisation for working families. If, in a working family, the mother goes off to have a baby on accouchement leave and then the baby's born—because we're never too sure when they're going to come—they will be jostling for places against people who don't have to go to work to get the baby into a childcare centre so they can go back to work. I understand the reasons why the government would want to move in this direction, but you have to be aware of the global impact of any decision—the reaction, if you like. What gives way for this? I'm very concerned about that.

We've seen a big investment in child care since this government came to power. There was $4 billion for higher subsidies. There was $3.6 billion for the 15 per cent lift in wages for the sector. I'm not saying anything against that in principle. Now they say there's another $426 million to guarantee 72 hours a fortnight. There's a bit of a moot point here. The Productivity Commission says this will cost $2.3 billion, and that's a fair kind of gap, one would have to say. But whichever figure you use, $426 million or $2.3 billion, and you add it to the $7.6 billion spent before, there's a hell of a lot extra going into child care in Australia, and the only way people in my community, in many of my communities, can participate in this largess is they get to pay the bill. They get to pay a bit more tax to make it cheaper for people who already have the service to access the service. It's more for the haves in this particular case and absolutely nothing for the have-nots. It does not recognise in any way the issues we are facing in rural and regional Australia, and, as far as this government is concerned, it virtually doesn't affect anyone who lives in the seats this they represent here in this place, and I think that's absolutely apparent. They do not care for people who don't provide them a seat in the parliament. It's pretty appalling, I'd have to say.

So places like my home town of Kimber, Wudinna, Wilmington, Oaroo—I could go on—have all approached me about trying to get a child care centre in their towns, but they have no infrastructure, they have no private provider, and councils aren't willing to step up into that space and provide a large investment that would probably be loss-making in the long term. I don't blame them, but something has to be done. We have a program that still exists. It's called home care and it's a pretty good idea, really, like somebody living and working in their house, perhaps, going about household chores, or even working in the home office from time to time or whatever fits, can manage to have up to three kids in their house, very much like having school holidays and three children in the house while you are running a house. But it's become increasingly difficult and unattractive to run these programs—regulations. Regulations are driven by government directions, and they are being strangled. The problem is now you can't get anyone to stick their hand up to have a go. In fact, the regulators have been trying to corral these people to provide home care in commercial premises. It's a bit of a nonsensical statement, isn't it—provide home care in a commercial premises where you can combine with someone else providing home care in a commercial premises, to make sure it's safe for the children. It's just not recognising the reality.

Other place like Crystal Brook need to expand. Kadina need to rebuild as they have outgrown the building. They have, I think, 70 people on their books waiting to get in at the moment. Kadina had a bid in for the Growing Regions Program. The Growing Regions Program was announced the other day. I got three projects in Grey. The member for Barker got two projects in Barker. I think that's the extent of the South Australian largess. We managed to snaffle three per cent of the national total that went into this Growing Regions Program. In my case, there's one program in Whyalla, one in Oaroo ,and the other is to build art rooms in the APY lands for the men. Kadina, which has a shovel-ready project, put in for this program—not a razzoo.

People are discouraged and its hurting. We need to get the message through. Alternatively, perhaps we need to change the government, and people will have a chance to do that in the not too distant future. I don't pretend that the solutions are easy, but, until governments recognise that we have a problem, absolutely nothing is going to get fixed, and I bring this problem to the parliament. I'm very hopeful that my successor, because I'm running out of speed, will be bringing this problem back as well. I've been working with Tom Venning around the electorate. He's met with a lot of people. If he comes back in my place, I can guarantee, he will be on this wagon as well.

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